Last week I went into a primary school to talk about careers, and into a sixth form college to talk about the Large Hadron Collider. There were good questions from both sets of students, and one of the good ones was present in both. It was, roughly: “When did you decide you wanted to be a scientist, and why?”

The short answer, would be “I don’t know. Twice.” But of course I have better answers, stories which undoubtedly have elements of truth along with elements of wishful thinking and personal mythology, which help me make sense of how I got here. We all have them, I guess. For some it’s moon landings, or pond water under a microscope. For some I hope it will be CERN and the Large Hadron Collider. Myself, I’ve answered the question a lot of times*, and the answers I give are pretty consistent by now. There are two.

Once upon a time, me and my little brother and a friend of ours decided that space and stars were important and interesting. I think the friend and I were about nine, my brother was about six. We decided we would write a book, which would contain everything there was to know about the solar system and all the other stars. We began what we considered to be research, which as far as I recall mostly involved going to the library and taking out books about space. (Living in the middle of Manchester, actually looking at stars in the sky was quite tricky what with clouds, smoke and street lights. So why did we ever get started on stars? I do not know.) We noticed the the newer books about space had more information that the older books, and sometimes they disagreed. And we quite quickly got to the point where we realised we were never going to do this, not because there was too much information - In the arrogance of our youth we felt we could deal with that, we were going to be around forever anyway - but because the amount that was getting known was growing faster than we could possibly write it down. That was a really good moment, that was when we actually realised that science was an ongoing process of exploration and that we were exploring so fast that by the time we’d finished the book it would already be out of date. So we gave up on the book but I didn’t give up on science. I guess in this process too I started to realise that people doing research clearly were not just getting their information from books, because they were making new books, with new information which came from looking around themselves at the universe and thinking.

My second story features my maths teacher when I was about fourteen. Mr Vernon treated maths like some kind of cheat sheet to the way things worked. I remember measuring gradients by drawing tangents to a curve (I know, I know -
measuring stuff in a maths lesson!). The curve was y = x². Then he came to the back of the class and told those of us who were interested that, if you drew your tangent properly and measured it correctly, the answer would always be 2x. “I’m not supposed to tell you that. It’s called differentiation...” I was hooked. He also put up, albeit a bit grumpily, with my questions like “But sir, what is a cosine, really, when you get right down to it?”

These are both oversimplifications. The events, or something very like them, definitely happened. But neither were Damascene conversions to the cause, or career, of science. I went through plenty of phases after those times when a career in science was a long way from being a goal in life. At least, that’s how I remember it...

While the hows and whys of me getting into science may be of limited interest, I think the history of how human society began “doing science”, how it became seen as a distinct methodology, and how - despite relapses and reaction - we continue to be able to progress, is fascinating. As are the often apocryphal and self-serving myths we tell ourselves about it all. I guess a possible simple answer is that acquiring and evaluating evidence as objectively as possible gives us the right answer more often on average than other methods of trying to find things out, and so as long as we have the means to pass the knowledge onward between generations, it will on average prevail as a useful methodology. Of course there is no guarantee that this will continue indefinitely; there is no guarantee that we’ll continue to do science well, or that we will be smart enough to pay attention to the results. It’s hard not to look nervously at the weather as I write this.

* The only copy of my answer I could find was the one after Robin Ince asked me roughly the same question for his Cosmic Genome app (go get it, it’s ace, and the fact that you can see me mumble through this stuff looking like I have spent the night outdoors is a negligible detraction from its aceness).

Jon Butterworth’s book, Smashing Physics, is out on 22 May. Order it now!